14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has big plans for the future. Long story short, it wants to grab hold of an asteroid, tow it near the moon and make it orbit our planet's satellite.
The agency is fairly confident that it will succeed in this endeavor. Many other scientists, on the other hand, are not.
They say that, at least as far as this wacky plan to bring an asteroid close to the moon is concerned, NASA is all talk and will probably accomplish nothing in the end.
Oddly enough, they think the agency will fail not because it lacks the technology which would allow it to toy with our solar system in said manner, but because it will not manage to find a space rock that suits its requirements.
“There’s great scepticism, among both the science community and the public, that this can actually be pulled off,” planetary scientist Jim Bell said at a recent meeting of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, as cited by Nature.
By the looks of things, little over 10,000 near-Earth asteroids are presently floating through space.
Most of these are pretty big, so NASA only has 370 asteroids that are small enough for capture to pick and choose from.
The bad news is that, of these 370 space rocks, merely 14 have a suitable orbit, the same source informs us.
What’s more, just 4 have been studied thoroughly enough for NASA scientists to be able to know anything about their make-up and spin rate.
Such information is mandatory if the agency is to avoid damaging its spacecraft while trying to catch and tow an asteroid, so it's no wonder scientists doubt NASA will ever succeed to bring an asteroid close to our planet and its moon.
Asteroid tracker Paul Chodas argues that, provided that the agency started spending more time looking for asteroids near our planet, at least a dozen more potential candidates could be found over the next 3-4 years. Otherwise put, NASA might actually see its dream come true.
Truth be told, the agency did say that it will probably be at least 8 more years until our moon gets a satellite of its own, so maybe things will start looking up in the not so distant future.